A: Why do Bulgarian policemen always go around in threes?
B: Dunno. Why?
A: One knows how to read, and one knows how to write.
B: What's the third one for?
A: He's keeping an eye on the two intellectuals.

Russian humour, which overlaps a lot with Brazilian humour, was a glory to me when I learned Russian. This joke is my favourite, I've updated it a little but not too much.

Hey Sergei! Long time no see! Is that a wedding ring?
Yes my old friend, it is a wedding ring.
I never thought that you of all people get married.
Well, I got tired of eating at McDonalds.
And now..?
And now I like eating at McDonalds.

By the bye, I learned Russian to read Tolstoi in the original and I discovered that the transalation

Agreed. It was easy to set up (already have a server at home) and there're native clients for Android and for meego (Nokia N9). Also very good web interface. Mobile web interface is a bit slow on my Nokia N9 though.

If this is installable on my shared hosting (looks to be from first glance), then I'll definitely be giving it a fair try. I've slowly but surly been moving all my stuff over to my own domain, because I've been caught more than once with web services being taken offline for no apparent reason. I use GMail, but only as a viewer. My email is all addressed to my own domain.

The UI runs fine on shared hosting, but if you can't either run a persistent daemon (recommended) or at least a cron job (and it can't be "webcron", since it needs the PHP CLI binary), it will only update the feeds when you have the reader open in your browser.

Personally, I think getting a cheap (less than $4/month) VPS on lowendbox is a better way than trying to force it on shared hosting.

Actually, just got it set up with my Dreamhost account and it works fine. I had to set up the cron job, but Dreamhost makes it really easy to set up. The only hickup was that the default PHP interpreter for the command line is 5.2, and I had to do a simple google search to figure out the path to the PHP 5.3 executable. Had the whole thing configured in under half an hour.

I used to use Reader. It was a great way to listen to several different NPR programs without digging through 8 different websites (NPR has a different page for each program, each with a different format). Then the various NPR programs started changing what was in their feeds to the point where it wasn't useful anymore. I had other feeds I was using Reader for, but I haven't used Reader since then.

Suggests that really, google should spin it off and let someone else run it. There's enough demand for it. If I had a startup with a product that 30% of/. cared about, I'd consider myself in pretty good shape.

So, what's stopping you? I hear a hell of a lot of bitching about how Google Reader is going away and how all the replacements suck. So what's stopping you (or anyone else) from tapping this vast, unserved market? It's not like parsing a bunch of XML files and presenting them in an organized fashion is exactly rocket science. Sounds like Google's opening up a golden opportunity for someone.

Google doesn't write standalone webapps like any startup out there; they use a bunch of proprietary backend technologies (for storage, HTTP fetching, etc). Prying that out of Reader would probably take as much effort as rewriting it using some other platform.

The 30% is not 30% of Slashdot users. It is 30% of the people who felt inclined to respond to the poll. The number is likely that high because those who use the service are more inclined to respond to a poll that concerns the service. Always keep that in mind and always consider the verbiage in poll questions. Those are the two biggest ways to get confused. It is actually easy to construct a poll that will get you the results you want regardless of how people feel on the subject.

I didn't think it necessary to preface my post with an explanation of why a poll on slashdot isn't all that statistically valid... on slashdot.

That said I agree with you that there is massive selection bias in who would choose to take the poll, that the audience who would even see the poll nevermind choose to partake is itself massive selection bias unto itself.

The point remains, a subtantial portion of slashdot knows what reader is, and a nontrivial subset of it actively uses it. Doesn't matter what the ac

Somewhere in the thread I posted a list of links to folks who were interested in viable alternatives. (By the way, valid point about not needing to preface your post but it seemed like you were missing it given the tone of your post - to me at least, no slight was intended or anything.) If you seek out said post, CTRL + F and my name should find it, you may find something there that inspires you to create a service of your own or gives you insight into how others are reacting. I'm always one to advocate inv

If could suggest that a lot of people don't actually care enough to vote.... I only clicked through because one of my housemates was complaining about it being shut down, and I was hoping to find a suggestion that'd be good enough to satisfy her...

The problem with this "70% of I don't use Reader" is that the other 30% that used it.
They are highly connected and, I bet, most of them are content producers. These are the trend creators. By pissing them, Google only has created the impression the its services cannot be trusted in the long term... And it will stick.

Well, that was extremely easy to get started with. But it appears to have subscribed to the enitre scienceblogs, rather than the one scienceblog that I subscribed to (Tim Lambert's Deltoid, which currently has 12 posts per year or so). Now I got page upon page of Orac's ramblings. And there appears to be no easy way in the inferface to shut him up.

What? Not a fan of the wax tablet [wikipedia.org]? Fun fact: the Romans preferred wax tablet to papyrus for written contracts. There were techniques for emending papyri and so these were mistrusted. It's easy to apply heat to the whole of a wax tablet and thus start again with (literally) a tabula rasa. But any subsequent emendation to a contract written on wax (short of blanking it completely which wouldn't do any good since the other party had a copy) is always easy to detect. Therefore, wax tablets could act as an early

I get feeds from a pile or research journals in my field. A typical day I can have 150 new items in the feed, perhaps 2-3 of which are actually of interest to me at the time. With a feed reader I can leaf through and pick out the few interesting ones in ten minutes. If I had to go to the site of each journal I'd spend half my morning doing the same.

Or say you're following tech sites such as Verge, Ars Technical and so on. Much faster to flip through all their new items and visit the ones that interest you than having to visit each site individually.

Finally, feeds are good for anything that updates irregularly. Since it's in your feed you can simply ignore it, and yet never risk missing an update. "XKCD What If", "WTF Evolution" and "Research In Progress" come to mind as perfect for this.

You should read better feeds. Cropping is a sign of ad-driven content. Personally, well above 80% of my feeds include full content (either text or a link to a podcast).

If you only read spam spewing machines like Slashdot, it doesn't make much sense to use a feed reader. But if you also read that blog from the guy who only posts twice a month (at a random schedule) but whose posts are always a must-read, then RSS is extremely useful. It's even useful for some aggregators; for example, Lambda the Ultimate onl

I have always used liferea. I prefer a local client than a web based client. My computer can download all the feeds while I eat breakfast and then i can read them on the train (If i want to read more I can flag it for later). I actually use flagging of articles as a sort of bookmark system, most interesting things on the web I hear about through an rss feed.

Okay since no one used Reader, I have a question about another Google cancellation: What's a good replacement for iGoogle? I've used it as a handy little bag-of-holding with news headlines from a half dozen or so sources. It will be annoying to have to deal with the actual sites' home-pages, which, like all news websites, universally suck ass.

Some similar customizations can be made with the Google news site. You could, I don't know if you still can, setup the main pages at Yahoo and MSN to be customized in a similar fashion. I imagine both of them have retained the features that enable that. You could probably forward your GMail to their service and get similar functionality with that. However, for the most part, you can do a lot of the same features just with the Google News customization functions ASSUMING that those too aren't going away. I h

The NSA would see a lot less hand-wringing if they offered their scanning and analysis abilities as a service to the public.

Hell, they have a record of my emails, my phone calls, my web surfing, my financial transactions. Pretty much everything I do electronically. Plus they apparently map out circles-of-acquaintances to determine social groups. I'm sure there are a myriad of services they could offer with all that information.

No ads plus Congressional oversight. That's more than you can say about Google or

Speaking of RSS readers, anyone got any suggestions for a replacement for the Google homepage (iGoogle) that they're dropping in November? It's the only RSS reader I've ever used, and I can't stand the interface of any other RSS reader I've ever seen. I don't want all my news in one feed, because some update monthly (or even less), some update twelve times an hour, some even update three times in one day then go silent for six months. So I want to see the latest updates from everything at a glance to know w

I'm behind a national firewall in the Middle East, and I still want access to feeds that are banned by my local government. Take your pick. Atheism. Politics. Religion. LGBT issues. Real news. I could get it all over Google Reader because it cached everything, images included, on the Google servers. Any software I install on my machine here would be on the wrong side of the curtain.

I've never used Reader directly, I use it as a back-end for syncing my home RSS reader (RSS Owl) with my work RSS reader (NetNewsWire) so I don't have to remember which articles I've already read or not.

So far neither app has said what they'll support as a replacement back-end when Reader goes down, although the NetNewsWire folks have said they're doing something, just not what.

I prefer a local client that downloads attachments - podcasts, pdf etc.
My preference is feedreader - but to be honest I only look at it every couple of weeks. I get most updates via twitter. - and follow people mainly for the interesting stuff they give me.

RSS was designed to be directly accessed by readers. I use Vienna, which pulls down the RSS feeds directly to my Mac. I don't see the point of using a middle man, who really is just going to try and find a way of monetizing my "marketing data".

I've heard of it but have no use for it. I'm not even sure what it does/did but I think it is an aggregation service via RSS. My browsers all offer RSS functionality but I haven't made us of that much though I used it when it was new and interesting simply because it was new and interesting. I've used RSS mashed up as a script with a CRON job to insert textual updates automagically into web sites but that's about the only use I have for it.

Never used it either. It sucked However 99% of all "RSS apps" for mobile phones, including the few that are worth anyone's time, use it for infrastructure.

This.

I never used Google Reader. However, I do use an RSS reader. And to keep in sync across the devices, my reader uses Google Reader infrastructure---as do most readers. That is, I keep my reading history "in the cloud", this being one of the things the cloud is good at.

So, Google did the RSS sync thing well, so well that everyone else used the infrastructure. Google Reader itself though was, at best, meh. Everyone else used the Google Reader infrastructure invisibly, so there was no contribution to Google's coffers.

Google could have competed with a better RSS client, but they didn't. Instead, they have killed their poor client and also their pretty good infrastructure. As far as I can tell, that's the reason people are upset. They don't care about Google Reader, but the loss of the syncing infrastructure is a problem.

It's a news aggregator... the progression of RSS/ATOM readers, if you will. I like them -- I get most of my news through random other places (like Slashdot), but for things that may slip by like rarely updated must-read blogs, I liked google reader. It's pretty easy to live without, but it did combine like 10 sites that I regularly hop around down to one link, which was helpful.

I haven't used RSS readers since they were new and fashionable. I realized that it just didn't suit my methods of doing things. This isn't a slander against the technology, it just doesn't suit my particular methods and thus it doesn't suit my needs. I have found that I enjoy iGoogle though. It is located at https://google.com/ig [google.com] but, alas, it too is going away in November. So be it... I didn't use it enough to worry about it, I'd log in and check it for a few days in a row every couple of weeks with a brok

You know someone points that out with pretty much every single poll that is posted to Slashdot, right? You know that we freely give this information up and that we're all geeks here and are fully aware of what we're giving up and we're very much aware that it is trivial. It is of, quite literally, no consequence. To what end do you expect your whinging to affect change, what change would you like, and why (and how) would you like those changes implemented?

If only there were a site you could go to where you could type that question in and get a response. It is too bad that there is no such critter because if there were such a critter it would almost certainly be faster, more effective, and more efficient than typing your question into this site and hoping that someone comes along and gives you a non-sarcastic response that actually helps.